In the field of, for example, voltage conversion in the DC/DC computing market, the demands are constantly growing with respect to power switches. Until now, drivers and controller chips used, for example, in buck converters typically include discrete field-effect transistors (FET). However, also in high-current applications (as for example for currents comprising 5-100 A/phase or between 20-40 A/phase) the integration is constantly increasing. Apart from additional features such as current sense or temperature sense, logic circuitry or whole output stages of gate drivers may be integrated in power stages of field-effect transistors.
Therefore, there is a demand in silicon technology to provide at low cost a high integration while ensuring a secure isolation maintaining the reliability of the circuitry.